Well, I had a very special relationship with the sea.

Ever since I was little.

It wasn't rational, it was a very sentimental relationship and what attracted me were the wooden boats.

I liked the traditional boats in the port of San Sebastian and I was somehow obsessed with them, right?

Since we started building this boat, it has been an extraordinary opportunity to learn from our ancestors.

That is, what we are very clear about is that our ancestors developed a technological knowledge that was key to opening up the oceans of humanity.

And that is transformative for us, because we have to take into account that elements as important as ships, ships were back then the equivalent of the space rockets of our day.

This ship was one of those rockets that linked the Old World with the New.

With the New World.

Because you have to keep in mind that the ships of ocean exploration were ships, like the ships of Christopher Columbus, like the ships of Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano and many more.

They were ships that very few managed to return home.

But there comes a time when, in the 16th century, human beings are already familiar with ocean navigation, they begin to build ships like the San Juan, which are work ships, merchant ships, and the San Juan represents the first type of ocean merchant ship of humanity.

And they are already ships that have the job of going and coming back continuously, right?

It is also true that the destination of these ships was not always the one they were pursuing.

When countries started sailing the oceans and looking beyond their frontiers, when humans started crossing the Atlantic, first, we just wanted to look for other ways to reach known destinations that were important for trade and commerce.

But in the process, not only we bump into a new continent, which open up all sorts of opportunities for resources, but it also opened up the opportunity to develop very unique instruments to sail in uncharted lands.

We are learning those technological secrets learning those technological secrets that are vital and that were decisive for the connection of the Old World and the New World.

When we meet in an hour of change and challenge in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance.

Even though I realize that this is in some measure, an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.

But if I were to say my fellow citizens that we shall send to the Moon 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses, several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food, and survival on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that on the temperature of the sun, almost as hot as it is here today, and do all this, and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out, then we must be bold.

But why some say the Moon Why choose this as our goal?

And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain?

Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?

Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the Moon.

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win.

A question since the beginning of the space age has been, why?

Ever since the United States and the Soviet Union decided that they wanted to go to the Moon, the public said, why?

The main incentive for exploring the oceans was, without any doubt, wealth, and power.

Ultimately, the traders, merchants, and ship owners who participated in it wanted to increase profits.

That was the main reason.

On the other hand, kingdoms such as Castile or Portugal would support these maritime activities, not only because they were great income sources but also power sources.

It's the biggest story of the year, possibly the number one story of the century.

This launching of the Russian satellite, which brings into the realm of possibility all those wild science fiction stories of interplanetary travel Watch it.

It's fascinating.

This animation is a graphic portrayal of how a satellite operates.

This story of the Russian satellite burst upon a startled world early in October.

Russia announcing she had shot a man made moon 560 miles into space where it was circling the Earth at the dizzy speed of 18,000 miles per hour.

I look at our evolution in space and really the use of space, in three big epochs The first one started in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the very first satellite into space.

Back then, it was a matter of a competition.

The superpowers of the day, like in the old times they wanted to prove what's the next frontier, who can take advantage of that, that was the case between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The flight continues well.

The third stage of the rocket is working everything is fine.

The mood is upbeat I see the earth, I see the horizon.

The horizon is slightly shifted to the feet.

Everyone is going well.

How do you hear?

How are you feeling?

I hear you perfectly.

Feeling great, the flight continues well.

I observe the Earth The visibility is good, you can distinguish, you can see everything.

You also, at the same time, had this strategic race to the Moon.

You know, you think about President Kennedy's famous speech and the entirety of the 1960s, the Apollo Program, getting us to the Moon.

Houston, this is Neil, radio check.

Neil, this is Houston, loud and clear.

Break break, Buzz, this is Houston, radio check and verify TV circuit breaker in.

Roger TV circuit breaker in.

It’s about… one or two inches, although the surface appears to be very, very fine grained as you get close to it.

It's almost like a powder.

Ground mass is very fine.

I’m going to step off the LM now.

It's one small step for a man.

one giant leap for mankind.

Surface is fine and powdery I can I can pick it up loosely with my toe.

It does adhere in the fine layer like powered charcoal to the spool and size of my boot.

The next epoch I look at is really, I'll say the 1970s to maybe 2010-ish time frame, but for a good thirty or so years, these were governments in the lead, government technology and government resources.

And this is the world's best view.

And you can see the entire world from up here.

FYI I've just lost four separate temperature transducers on the left side of the vehicle, hydraulic return temperatures.

Four hyd return temps to the left outboard and left inboard elevon.

Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages, and we did not copy your last.

Is that instrumentation, Max?

Flight max, those are also off.

Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check.

Columbia, Houston, UHF comm check.

In the words of a flight director at NASA, it has been a bad day.

Seven astronauts have died, their families shattered, the space program has been dealt a terrible blow.

The larger family of men and women in space exploration devastated, and the country has been reminded how dangerous it is, and that for all of America's technological genius, it doesn't always work.

This morning, just before eight o’clock Texas time, the Space Shuttle Columbia was just about to finish a picture perfect 16 day scientific mission.

The astronauts families were by the runway in Florida, poised for a great reunion.

Columbia was at 200,000 feet, going 12,500 miles an hour when it suddenly broke up, under stress that we still do not understand.

Sixteen minutes from home.

10 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 The Boeing Corporation and Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX have each presented to us designs that will allow us to fly crews to the International Space Station in just a few years.

Respectively, the vehicles are Boeing CST 100 and SpaceX's Dragon.

We're in this really interesting time right now, this third epoch in space where it is no longer just governments in the lead.

You have this phenomenal commercial space sector with commercial technologies, commercial resources, space used in so many different ways than we had envisioned in the past.

That is I think the cusp of what we're on right now.

My first time through the Canal, I must have been a teenager.

It was a great day.

I remember it was a northbound ship, northbound meaning it's going from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

I had no idea what what was happening.

But it just made a big impression on me.

The Panama Canal is one of the wonders of the world.

The Panama Canal, in addition to being the 8th wonder of the world, is an emblematic entity worldwide.

if we actually look at North America, Central America, South America, Panama actually has a surprising geographical position where you can quickly get from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean.

I think that was the vision that the group that started with the Panama Canal initially had, since in this way distances can be shortened because time is money.

As pilots, we're very proud of what we do.

We're 300 strong, and we're just a few.

But what we do is something so important for the world.

Thanks to our geographical position, an enormous portion of world trade passes through this very small space every year.

So it's very delicate what we do.

We have to understand a lot of elements coming together.

Space is like the oceans.

It's a common resource that we can use for all sorts of services on which we depend here on Earth.

But all of the world's space assets are packed into the same finite region of space where satellites can orbit.

And like the Panama Canal these orbits are located in a relatively small region of space that can get increasingly dangerous as it becomes crowded.

Today, there is roughly 9,000 or so operational satellites in orbit.

That number is quickly growing.

You start to think of Starlink is continuing to put hundreds to thousands of satellites in orbit.

You have other constellations coming.

Amazon Kuiper, you have One Web out of Europe that's up in orbit.

The Chinese have announced that they plan to launch the equivalent of four Starlink-like constellations in the thousands to tens of thousands of satellites.

So the number of satellites overall is growing.

That also comes with just growing numbers of objects that you now have to be aware of because you want to avoid collision between those objects.

And the fact of the matter is over the last 60 years or so, human beings have been trashing space.

We've been leaving our empty rocket boosters.

We've been leaving dead satellites.

We leave pieces of satellites.

We let these things stay up there and collide, and they do, which can stay up there for decades or more.

Well, there's no difference in risk between a government satellite colliding or a commercial satellite colliding.

The laws of physics are the laws of physics, and they don't care And LeoLabs provides the service, which again I think is critical, which is how do you operate your satellite so you don't both create more debris by running into stuff, as well as know if somebody is not following the rules.

Because when there is no monitoring of space, as there wasn't in the past, even if you have all the well-intentioned rules against creating debris or trash in space, who follows it if you know nobody's watching?

Physics sucks in this case, because it's not like an incident in the air or at sea, where that debris falls down to land.

In space, when you have a collision, all of that debris stays trapped in orbit.

So all other satellites that pass through that have to maneuver around it.

There are over 36,000 pieces of debris estimated that are larger than the size of a softball.

There are estimated to be over 1 million pieces of debris larger than the size of a pea.

We don't have the capability today, any nation, to track that many objects at that small of a size.

You know, you think, well, what could a pea do to a satellite?

When that pea is traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, it can do an immense amount of damage to a satellite.

There are so many objects being launched into space and there are so many objects which are no longer active satellites, or they are spent rocket bodies, or debris which has resulted from former collisions, or even anti-satellite tests that have been carried out.

And there's an urgent need to remove this debris from space, but while we are trying to figure out how to remove it, we at least need to be able to track it and know where it is so that those who are operating satellites can safely maneuver to avoid collision.

A giant container ship is blocking the Suez Canal one of the world's busiest waterways, the route is vital for the movement of everything from oil to consumer goods.

I think most of us aren't aware of just how much global trade hangs by a thread.

I don't think people realize how much we rely on space in our daily lives.

Any time you go to an ATM and get out cash or you put gas in your car, you rely on that Uber or that DoorDash delivery, you turn on the Internet or you get broadcasts from halfway around the world of the World Cup, all of that relies on space capabilities.

From a national security perspective, we are heavily reliant on space to collect intelligence and understand what's happening in the world.

Our military is heavily reliant on space.

Any activities that they do across the the globe, they need to stay connected, they need to know where they are.

They need to be very aware of missile launches or other threats.

If people need to know about space they need to know that it's an inherent part of their daily lives.

In a day without space, the internet would go dark.

In a day without space, the internet would go dark.

TVs, you wouldn't have live coverage, you wouldn't know that there was a disaster happening on the other side of the planet.

Utility grids, the electricity grids would fail.

Financial markets would crash.

We time stamp transactions thanks to synchronizing with atomic clocks which are based in space.

There is so much in the proper functioning of society that would not happen if we were not able to use space technology data and services.

I will venture to say that if we completely destroy all of our space assets, it will bring our civilization to its knees.

In 1883, a boundary rider called Charles Rasp was working on a huge pastoral property.

It was very similar to America, where you know, you had these great big, wide open spaces.

He was searching for minerals on this property and discovered this great big clump, which he thought was tin.

It eventually was processed, and it was one of the richest silver, lead and zinc finds ever in the world.

Many came to try and get wealthy with it.

The population of Broken Hill increased quite quickly in the early days.

It was a semi, pretty arid kind of country.

Vegetation was sparse and rocky, pretty flat.

It ended up being a very, very harsh sparse land for people to live on.

There was no permanent water supply.

The environment was tough.

There was no shelter anywhere.

They had an extremely tough time in the early days, would not have been an easy place to live.

They very quickly understood that they needed a reliable permanent source of transport.

So that small part of rail opened up Broken Hill, not only to the mining side of it so that the ore could get to port, but it also became the permanent passenger service and freight service.

You think how dark it is on a dark night when you walk outside, that's nothing.

Underground, when you turn your cap lamp off, there's no darkness like that.

You put your hand right up in front of your face, no sensation, even that it's there.

Yeah, it's a different world.

I worked on the mines, but I was a tradesman, a fitter machinist, later, an electrical fitter.

I did work underground doing my apprentice training, and it's a different world.

Mining's traditionally been relied on to provide the things that everyone sort of knows about, coal and steel and whatever.

I think the point that people kind of miss is how reliant we are on mining.

Unless you're talking about natural fibers or timber, everything else is sourced from mining.

Plastics come from the oil and petrol type industry.

Cars that we drive are made out of multitudes of metal, the houses that we live in are powered through via copper wires.

Without mining, we'd be absolutely primitive.

We'd be living in caves.

If you have a mobile phone, do you really care what type of metals, rare Earth elements are inside?

No, you don't.

You use it for many purposes, but resources are running underneath it.

From the moment you wake up, until the moment you go to bed, everything that you do runs with resources.

And the same thing will happen in space.

If you're going to have a sustained presence on a planetary body, if you want to have more able transportation, lower costs, you're going to have to rely on resources.

There's a hope that we can mine the minerals on the Moon.

There's ice on the Moon that's hoped that we can get into at some point and create fuel and energy out of.

If you are going to have a sustained presence on a planetary body, larger and more capable payloads, achieve space transportation at a lowered cost you are going to have to rely on resources beyond Earth.

We are already starting to see hints about useful things that can be done in space and on the Moon.

We have companies currently using low gravity and high vacuum in space stations to produce very high quality fiber optic cable, and medical implants through bioprinting with much better properties than the ones you can develop here on Earth.

How about using the very cold areas on the Moon for data storage, for quantum computing?

And at that point, you start escalating your thinking for possibilities, although you reach a point at which you can no longer foretell what's going to happen.

Many years ago, an apprentice who worked on the mine was rotated into my department.

Him and his dad had built a telescope, and he asked me if I'd like to go and have a look at it.

And I'd never looked up.

People don't look up, they have no clue, mostly, as to what's up there.

Eventually I did go to have a look.

to say that it made a great effect on me is truly the greatest understatement.

Humans are going to continue thinking, what's next?

How we can expand our civilization?

And that is going to include the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and beyond.

It is different now.

It is not about who's gonna be first on a place or arrive at a certain point.

It's about having sustained presence, have a base where you're gonna have humans operating there, doing all sorts of activities, extracting water and resources so they can now live out of the land in there, and eventually have - build astronomical observatories or whatever we are going to do on the Moon.

That's going to take - it's not a race anymore.

Yes, it's a race to get to do this, but the one that is going to win this is the one that can actually have a sustained presence.

So, in a way, it's now we're there to stay, and that's different from the 1960s.

The Chinese are piling up firsts, first to land on the dark side of the Moon.

I do worry that like they've done in the South China Sea, where they plant a flag and they started building up islands in the South China Sea, as they go to the Moon, will they plant a Chinese flag and say, this is mine, and build up and keep others out?

I don't think we fully have thought through what war in space looks like.

I don't think that we have settled on what event in space would trigger an act of war.

And given the existing geopolitics in the world that is really important, because as soon as there is a collision or something goes wrong, if you will, I think that will immediately lead to a politicization of what is, in fact, a discussion about space safety.

The Moon is governed by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, where no nation can have sovereign rights over any part of the Moon.

It was at the time with the Soviet Union, and the U.S.

were trying to go to the Moon.

The whole world got together and they started talking, how we going to deal with space.

More than 110 countries signed it because they thought it's just a matter between the U.S.

and the Soviet Union.

There's nothing that is valuable about space.

So it was a very idealistic treaty.

It's a really good one, in which it talks that there's no ownership of celestial bodies, there shouldn't be any militarization of space.

We should all help each other for scientific purposes.

You should benefit all humankind.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the Industrial Revolution, the first waves of modern invention and the first wave of nuclear power.

And this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space.

We mean to be a part of it.

We mean to lead it.

We need some kind of governance for a whole new era of space activity that we did not ever conceive would happen.

United States has articulated policy back in 2020, there is a defense space policy that basically says, if an adversary attacks our satellites, we reserve the right to respond in a domain at a time, at a place of our choosing.

In 2020, the United States started what's called the Artemis Accords.

The idea was to get together all the countries that are willing to play by common rules and conduct lunar operations in an orderly way.

What, and when rockets will be launched by each nation, what type of operations will be conducted on the Moon?

If you're going to have resource extract operations, in what area will you operate?

How much time will you be there?

Also, to be aware of safety zones to not interfere or endanger neighboring operations.

So the idea is, if everybody signs up to these accords, then we can all play by the rules, and we all benefit from a fair playing field.

It all started with nine countries in the original signing ceremony.

Nowadays, it seems that almost every month there is a different country joining the Artemis Accords.

We have more than 50 countries right now as part of them.

But at the same time, you have other countries like China and Russia forming their own International Lunar Research Station.

And there are now 13 countries today that have joined this group.

So you've got two poles, two poles that do not necessarily disagree on the principles but they reflect the political divisions we have here on Earth.

And we are carrying those divisions with us into space.

Are we doomed to repeat errors that we've made in the past?

Probably.

There's always - I mean, there's always - there's diversity in people.

There's diversity in cultures.

There's diversity in approaches, including in business It is hard enough to get China, Russia, the United States, all to the table to talk about, what are the - what does responsible space operations look like?

What should be that, What should be the behavior that we all abide by?

We've seen it in other domains.

You have things, you have mechanisms like the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO so that when United or American Airlines flies into Beijing, you know, it generally knows the, kind of the rules that must be abided by, and same thing when Air China comes into the United States.

We don't have any of those agreements in how we operate in space.

So part of me is pessimistic, and I hate to be, but I am.

These countries, we need to figure these kind of things out.

Otherwise, we will be in situations where you do have collisions and you create much more debris that makes some of these orbits just unusable for mankind.

Now, in order to come up with a way we can all play fair in space and do things effectively, but also responsibly and sustainably, we will have to develop good communication among us.

It is not just about two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the U.S., like in the 1960s.

It's about all space agencies, as well as commercial space sector that should be included in the process to truly benefit all humanity.

I do think that in space there is a history of cooperation that we have not seen in a lot of other areas.

Programs like the International Space Station.

So I think we have a good base to build up on there.

Now, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of work to do.

And coming up with these international rules, norms, and standards are going to be a negotiation because everybody's going to have a slightly different viewpoint of what they find important.

And that requires consensus at a global level.

Consensus and diplomacy takes time because it requires trust and relationships to be in place.

Would you be able to comment on, how did the coordination between you?

Was it proactive?

Was it reactive?

It would just be interesting to hear from your mind.

Any collision risk in the orbit, there is a sonar over the north orbit as well.

And so we do share the information, and we also get these similar support from other agencies.

It's very easy to throw stones at the UN, and blame it for the geopolitics that exists, for the wars that are going on.

Oh, the UN is not able to keep peace The UN leads only by convening, and we continue to convene, whether it's here in Vienna on space, whether it's in New York on other matters, whether it's in Geneva on disarmament affairs, we continue to convene, but we cannot control member states politics and positions.

That is out of our hands.

All we can do is keep people at the table and keep bringing them back to the table, and we do that successfully.

That's why it is so important that after seeing what we have done on Earth all of the obstacles and all the problems that we have created, we're starting from scratch.

Let's start in a right way.

If now we can predict that this is going to happen, let's try to do it in such a way that we're not going to run into problems.

The boundaries we draw between countries, from space, those lines simply disappear.

Interestingly, one of the most powerful resources that we get from space is inspiration.

It is an intangible resource and also a renewable one.

Since the beginning of humans walking on this Earth, space has held a fascination, an awe among all civilizations and countries.

It draws us to do things differently than on Earth, and we have all the same feeling.

You go anywhere around the world and look up on a dark night sky, and all problems disappear.

It's like a magic drug.

And to this day, regardless of how advanced our technology has become space still holds this fascination and inspiration of how things can be different.